The following is my contribution for last Thursday.
When I tell you that my father lives in a house with no coffee pot and no internet access, you might be tempted to believe, especially considering his West Virginia zip code, that he and my stepmother reside in a mountainside shanty made of recycled tractor tires and old 8-track tapes. Not so. They just don’t drink coffee, and my brother took the computer when he moved into an apartment across town; so, given the fact that my dad, who is a skilled metal machinist, probably doesn’t know how to turn on a computer, and my stepmother has email at work, the internet is just not a necessity. So it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that on Black Friday, I joined nearly every single resident of southern West Virginia on the bustling streets of Beckley and headed to Starbucks.
I pulled into the parking lot of the shopping center after a particularly roadrageous 3 mile trip that took almost 30 minutes, and as I was getting out of my car a sign caught my eye. Before I go on I should describe the setup of the shopping center, because even though you are going to laugh at me anyway, you should at least do so armed with information and maybe a little sympathy. Imagine, if you will, a glorified strip mall in the shape of a giant block letter C, with an enormous parking area in the middle. Starbucks is situated at the bottom of the C. The sign that caught my eye is at the top of the C, waaaaaaay across the giant parking lot. Far, far away.
So I’m looking at this sign. And looking and looking, trying very hard to figure out if it says what I think it says. It was one of those lighted signs, and it was red, and the lettering was in cursive, so the letters sort of blurred together. But I swear to you on all that is holy, I would have bet my two cups of coffee that the business across the way from Starbucks was called “Disinfectantly Yours.”
It wasn’t, of course. I believe it was actually “Delightfully Yours,” but that is not important. What’s important is the fact that I have either developed Adult Onset Dyslexia, or I really need to get my eyes checked, because I misread signs like that all the time. And even more important than that, why isn’tthere a store called “Disinfectantly Yours”? Because I would be a regular shopper there. And so, I’m betting, would all of you.
one small corner of the universe 